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How to make your own Travel Board

Phew! Being a full-time public school teacher means very little time for blogging… or home improvements! So when I do get a chance to finally relax after the last two hours of grading, sitting with my face in front of the screen isn’t generally the first thought that comes to mind.

I do want to take a minute to share something that I find incredibly inspirational while burying my face in my laptop grading my students work… and that is our office wall map! As a history and geography teacher, I highly appreciate world geography. And as the guy lucky enough to date Elieke, I am encouraged to highly appreciate world travel. Therefore we decided to mix our two loves and create an inspirational, wall mounted, world geography and travel romantic piece of wall art!

It really was incredibly easy. I stole (read as borrowed, read as “were misappropriated by the University) a few wooden pallets that we left out for trash. Once we got home, Elieke chose the slats that she like the best and I knocked them off with a hammer and then cut them down to size with my second favorite tool, my Dewalt circular saw.

This was my first experience with a saw of my own. I did not learn the lesson that no matter how hard you try, sawdust really will get everywhere and cover everything. More on that fun topic later!

Once the manly task of disassembling the pallets was complete, Elieke took off putting together her frame. Being manly and incredibly stubborn, I decided that I didn’t like her design… and completely rebuilt it. While my design ended up working in the end, it also had the unintended consequence of dumping our travel marking thumbtacks all over the garage floor. I’m pretty sure that my trip to Mexico fell victim to that debacle…

Anyways, the final product uses some very simple 1×4’s glued together for a rear frame, then a layer of fabric padding (got to protect the walls from the thumbtacks, stupid rental house), a layer of cardboard for the thumbtacks to stick into (this is key!) and finally, Elieke’s self constructed frame made out of pallet wood. We learned a lot, but most importantly that a $10 map from Costco and some carefully “appropriated” pallets can take up an entire wall of our office and keep us motivated not only to keep DIYing but also to keep traveling the world!